on various forums so the real number of actual
readers is unknown.

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Q. Producing the magazine must take a large amount of your time how do you cope?

Yes I sometimes wonder why I bother, but it does as you say take up a large amount of time, I maybe spend 30 minutes per day on the issue then a couple of hours at the weekend, collecting text sometimes even spellchecking the issue although this is rare, Ha ha.

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Q. Can I ask about the copyright and the issues with the early editions of the magazine?

If you must! Yes issues 1 to 3 were removed for copyright issues, I did borrow some text without permission, although that was resolved quickly but I soon started receiving emails from companies and solicitors claiming they owned to rights to various images and stills even though I had screen dumped them from Vice! They claimed as they owned the copyright to the games they owned the images, heck I even had an email supposedly coming from Microsoft saying they own the images of the windows system you know the top right of all
applications and I couldn't use these.

I managed to trace a lot of the emails with the help from an ISP and they all seemed to come from one area, although not one person! with the help and
advice of a solicitor I decided to stop spreading these issues and start again as a blank canvas, we contacted the ISP from where the emails were coming or seemed to be coming and then everything quietened down again, (i.e. the emails stopped) I still have a few people moaning about things, but so far not solicitors letters, at the time I wanted to just pack the whole thing in, I know now that some of these emails came from Commodore users themselves you know so called "elite" users Who didn't like the magazine as it wasn't techy enough or aimed at casual users and not die hard programmers . Still you can't please everyone!

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Q. Is the magazine produced on commodore machines?

Ahh Not entirely, although some text could be written on the Commodore using Geos, some in Notepad on the PC it's a mish mash, depends where I am and what
I am doing (for example now I am on my phone pecking out letters while listening to the interview as an mp3)

It would be possible to produce the magazine on the C64 with Geopublish especially as a patch went round where you could output postscript and colour JPG files Pity this wasn't officially released as It would have sold more CMD products, not that there is a mass market for such things anymore. I like
Geos, I could bore you with a long story about how I came to see GEOS and use the c64 to produce a church magazine

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Q. Go on then tell us

Man you really want to know this? Ok really quickly then, I heard of this system called GEOS, and my dad and I drove to London we went to a computer exhibition and saw them selling it, this was the first time the system had
been introduced in to the UK, we sat with the sales man as he demo'd the
system and my dad was so impressed he bought it with a few add ons that they were selling at the time, basically whatever they were selling we would have bought,

I am not sure what they company selling the product was, but I think it was just a distributer of GEOS and not Berkley themselves, we hooked up the system and created our boot disks and were away, my dad used it to create the church magazine for a while although he soon left it and bought a postscript printer and a PC! I like the look of GEOS and the way it's all laid out, completely impractical now, but I still think it looks nice, I also like the GEM OS on
the Atari but that's not something I should say in a Commodore Magazine; so I will remove this during editing! (whoops looks like I forgot to do this)

I usually arrange my Windows PC to look like geos you know all tiled, wonder
f there is a Geos Pc theme Ha bet there is you know!

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Q. So you say Commodore Free took over from Commodore Scene was Alan in favour of this?

Well via the internet I chatted with Alan and we met a number of times along with other regulars like Shaun Bebbington, Andrew Fisher and Chris Snowden
from www.commodore16.com we even found out that TMR (Jason Kelk) lives close
to Alan and TMR ran a short coding workshop for us but decided we were all
very poor programmers, although Shaun and Andrew are competent.

Anyway I asked Alan would there be a problem with me issuing a Free magazine
as it would in effect kill off Commodore Scene, he said he didn't have a problem with it, and so Commodore Free was born, or dragged its life force
into existence!

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Q. Someone mentioned you used to sell Commodore computers what was that all about?

Yes true. I worked for a company called Silica they were based in Sidcup Kent, they decided to expand and setup about 33 stores about the U.K. one was
planned for Manchester, I went along to the interview process along with thousands of other hopefuls, must have impressed them as I got the job, the gent interviewing me I think he was called Michael was the HR director he
said they hadn't met anyone who owned an Amiga 4000, he made the mistake of asking me about the features, so for 1 hour solid I bestowed the virtues of intuition and multitasking and the various memory and bus architectures of the Amiga 4000 on him and why commodore had failed to deliver a killer machine, poor guy, after an hour I stopped taking and thought to myself that I over did it, he handed me the job on the spot!

The "store" itself was situated on the third floor of Debenhams in Market street Manchester just across from the toy isle, Debenhams wanted to get into computer hardware and software but didn't want to risk it themselves, so they rented out the space commonly known as a concession, Silica paid a small
amount of rent and a percentage of each sale went to the store something like
5 or 6 %. The store flourished and I was made Manager for a while, I was looking after about 7 staff, they also sold PC and gaming equipment, I have fond memories of this, sadly I remember one of the directors telling me Commodore had files for bankruptcy or chapter 11 and they were going under! I think I lasted another year then left, Silica ploughed all its money into PC`s but they never arrived from the company in Germany ad so too they were in trouble and closed.

(Ben Vost Amiga format editor did a tour of Manchester, posing as a student
You can read his comments here)

Quote from Silica: "Babylon 5, [seaQuest] DSV, they're all done on the Amiga..."

cd.textfiles.com/amigaformat/aformat-17-19970808/-Look_here_1st!-/AF_on_th e_web/Websites/BenVost/writing/undercover.html

Silica were the U.K. importers of Commodore I think I am right in saying, the exclusive importers of Commodore, they would go under the name PRODIS OR SDL not sure what PRODIS stood for but SDL was Silica Distribution Limited.

For the job training all staff went to head office in London and stayed in a hotel, then we went to a couple of the running stores, I went to Tottenham court road and learned about networking Pc systems together, (erm I was supposed to be an Amiga specialist, I guess knowledge is a good thing as I
look after pc networks for a living now) the manager took me to a customers were we upgraded 10 machines from windows 3 to windows 3.11 for workgroups,
and had them all sharing and printing out documents it was shall we say enlightening.

This actually fuelled my interest more in computers and as I said today I work as a support engineer I look after about 250 users and 28 servers for a large manufacturing company near where I live, it's a far cry from Commodore.

Silica gave me some really nice memories, I met my wife in Debenhams for example and I saw the Sega Saturn before release and the Sony PlayStation not the mention the Cd32 with the FMV module, man I could have sold hundreds of these FMV modules had Silica been able to get their hands on them, the Cd 32 was a nice idea but the competition was just t

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